Many of my clients have large “appetites”: they want to create ambitious products with many features. Even though I recommend they start small and iterate their way to that ambitious product, these (smart people) still say they want to start with “more.” They think the team needs to see this ambitious product vision to know
This is Johanna Rothman’s June 2025 Pragmatic Manager newsletter. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. All my clients are dabbling with AI. They’re using it to think about more, such as generating more features in a backlog so each person can do more. Or more code with vibe coding. Or even
In my first post, Why We Have Too Much Pressure and Planning & Too Little Delivery, I discussed the issue of too much planning and how that reduced delivery. In this post, I’ll address how to increase delivery by planning less. (I have a draft post of the system view of how too much planning reduces
I work with many teams that have extensive product backlogs. Each iteration has a backlog of more items than the team can typically finish. Worse, some organizations want many quarters’ worth of backlogs, as in the image in this post. There are several problems with long and extensive backlogs: They tend to be wishlists of
This is the February 2025 Pragmatic Manager Newsletter, from Johanna Rothman. The Unsubscribe link is at the bottom of this email. Last month, I wrote about technical leadership micromanagement and the technical leadership overwhelm. (See One Secret to Free Yourself from the Overwhelm of Leadership Work for that post.) I heard from several product managers.
Do you have an overstuffed backlog the way Jenny did in Create More Success: How to Say No to “Everything” to Say Yes to What’s Necessary Now? I offered “now” advice in that newsletter. But what about the future? How can you prevent an overstuffed backlog, roadmap, or all those great ideas from interrupting your
Jenny, a product leader, glared at her supposed product backlog. She’d just transferred to this product and now she knew why the teams weren’t making progress. This backlog was more like her overstuffed sports closet. That closet had tennis rackets, a bat, and her two pairs of skis—all sports, but not for any one specific
Several of my clients are trying to do the impossible right now—plan their portfolio for an entire year. Or plan their product backlogs for eighteen months or longer. When I ask them how well that’s worked for them in the past, they often say, “Our planning works great. Our execution? Not so well.” That’s my
I have a new book: Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility. I wrote it because I’m concerned about what I see in too many supposedly agile teams: Crazy-long backlogs and roadmaps. Those create a serial lifecycle approach with too little experimentation. Worse, sometimes the team doesn’t demo or deliver.
Ted Williams said, “If you don’t think too good, don’t think too much.” I’ve got a bad head cold, so I’m not thinking too “good” at all. Here are three not-so-intuitive tips I use all the time, and that you might have missed: Move from “How much” to “How little” thinking. Finish something clean, every